CANADA: Open access - promises and challenges

Have you 'googled' yourself lately? Have you wondered why some of your publications did not show up in the search results? Have you ever tried to access one of your own journal articles online, only to be asked to pay US$30 by the publisher? Why are articles by some of your colleagues freely available online in full text even though they were also originally published in commercial journals? Is this permissible? Why is Google Scholar showing that your colleagues' articles are cited more than yours? Why is your institution's library paying millions of dollars each year for journal subscriptions and yet you are still unable to access some of the journals you need for your research?

Why do we give away our work and contribute free labour to refereeing for journals that put restrictions and price barriers on access? Should copyright laws designed to protect the entertainment industry govern the way researchers share and exchange ideas and how they make use of their work for teaching?

Do you know what an institutional repository is and whether your university has one? What could universities do to give the public a better understanding of their mission? Should funding agencies require that publications resulting from their support be made publicly available? If we were to reinvent the scholarly communication system, would we still have restricted access?

The common link between these seemingly disparate questions is Open Access (OA), or the free online access to scholarly publications, particularly those that are the result of public funding. While the primary target content of Open Access is the peer-reviewed journal article, other scholarly outputs such as books, data and teaching resources are also under the broader purview of Open Access.

With Open Access, readers with network access are free to download, copy, share and distribute publications without many of the permissions or cost barriers associated with traditional subscription based models of information exchange.

Open Access is neither radical nor new. It is a practice as old as scholarship itself but it was enabled by the internet in unprecedented and unexpected ways.[2] Open Access rests on the ethos that, as a form of public good, knowledge is far more beneficial to all when it is shared and built upon.

Indeed, academics have long engaged in gift exchange practices with their scholarly labour, contributing freely to peer review, taking on various editorial responsibilities, and contributing to their scholarly community without expectation of monetary returns. In exchange, they receive readership and research impact for their publications, which are increasingly measured in the form of citation.

Citation has gradually became the primary scholarly currency, conferring authority and prestige in the academy, which in turn translates into tangible benefits such as career advancement, reputation and grant funding. Broad dissemination of research results and points of view also serves the public good, which is a central mission of public universities.

In the Gutenberg era, when it was expensive to produce and distribute print, authors had little choice but to sign away their rights to publishers, even if it meant that their work was restricted to those who could afford to pay. Citation was thus transformed by commercial entities into a monetised commodity, to be bought and sold in the information economy, and scholars became unwitting players in this game.

Commercial publishers have exploited this system by acquiring prestigious journals from scholarly societies, offering enticing editorships to academics, and building collections that became 'must-haves' for research libraries.[3] To satisfy faculty demand, and to contribute to the status and ranking of their institutions, libraries were also forced into the game.

In the areas of science, technology and medicine (STM), three large multinational publishing conglomerates now publish about 50% of the titles worldwide, and the pace of acquisitions and mergers continues unabated.[4]

Thomson's Web of Science, Elsevier's Science Direct, and Wiley's (now Wiley-Blackwell) InterScience are 'products' familiar to academics lucky enough to work in well-resourced institutions. But these are walled gardens to be sure. Libraries in these institutions have dutifully paid the price for access for their faculty and most of us take this for granted.

The same, however, cannot be said for those working on the other side of the fence and the consequences are antithetical to the ethos of knowledge sharing. As Dr James Maskalyk wrote in the editorial of the inaugural issue of Open Medicine, allowing our collective research to be put behind a financial firewall means that "the transformation of research findings and discussion of the results - the application of knowledge - is curtailed. Just as importantly, the debate over its merit is stifled before it can properly begin."[5]

Who pays?

With digital distribution, publishers also discovered ways to boost profits from libraries by 'bundling' their titles with one take-it-or-leave-it price that leaves no room for library collection development. As a result, subscription costs have risen over 321% during the last two decades. Library budgets shrink and these costs continue to rise, although the cost of disseminating of online information has declined substantially in recent years.

As scholarly output grows and the cost of subscriptions spirals, even the richest institutions in the world cannot afford all of the publications faculty need.

According to Robert Darnton, professor of history and Director of Library at Harvard: "The result stands out on the acquisitions budget of every research library: the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year's subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning."[6]

This situation is of course far more acute in poorly resourced institutions, particularly those in the developing world. In effect, if subscription or toll access remains the primary mode of knowledge distribution, then only the richest universities will be able to engage in cutting edge research and current debate, as those who cannot afford the toll fee will continue to be condemned to the peripheries of global knowledge exchange.

It is also noteworthy that while serial price increases primarily affect the STM titles, there has been significant collateral damage to the humanities and social sciences (HSS) as libraries are more likely to cancel titles from smaller non-profit publishers that publish social sciences journals. Shrinking library budgets also mean that fewer specialised scholarly monographs, so central to many humanities disciplines, are being purchased.

Declining markets are causing university presses to make publication decisions based on economics, rather than on the intellectual merit of the scholarship. This is having a devastating effect on junior scholars, who are often dependent on the publication of monographs for hiring and promotion decisions. As Stephen Greenblatt, former president of the Modern Language Association, wrote in an open letter in 2002: "Higher education stands to lose, or at least severely to damage, a generation of junior scholars."

The ways to Open Access

Thankfully, the internet and Open Access are rewriting the rules of the scholarly publishing game, and now scholars can actually have their cake and eat it too. That is, they can continue to publish in prestigious outlets while ensuring that their work is as widely distributed and read as possible.[7]

They can do so by depositing a copy of their peer-reviewed articles either in their institutional repository (IR)[8] or in subject-based repositories such as the National Institute of Health's PubMedCentral.[9] This method is commonly known as author self-archiving, because authors or their libraries perform the archiving themselves. This is also called the Green Road to Open Access.[10]

Alternatively, authors could choose the so-called Gold Road and publish in suitable Open Access journals in their field, which are growing steadily in number.[11] Open Access journals differ from traditional journals only in terms of their business models, and most retain a conventional editorial and peer-review process.

The Gold Road has received a great deal of attention, particularly in the popular press, because of the 'author-pay' model whereby authors are asked to pay an article processing fee after peer review has been conducted and upon acceptance. The commercial publisher BioMedCentral[12] (BMC) pioneered this model and now publishes about 150 Open Access titles. The non-profit publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)[13] uses the same scheme to finance its operation.

As the cost of author fees could range from $1,500 to over $3,000, many researchers in HSS are fearful that such a model cannot be sustained in their fields. There are also concerns that this model would exclude researchers from the developing world as the fees are simply out of reach.

While BMC and PLoS do make exceptions for authors from developing countries, it is important to keep in mind that journals that charge author fees are in fact in the minority.

Using data from the Directory of Open Access Journals[14], Peter Suber and Caroline Sutton[15] found that less than 20% of the Open Access journal publishers use the author fee model, which is primarily used by publishers in STM and by commercial publishers. Their study also indicated that 427 scholarly societies publish 496 fully Open Access peer-reviewed journals. Another 19 societies publish another 74 hybrid Open Access journals that have a mix of Open Access and subscription options.

Although a complete picture of the financial models used by the Open Access journals is not yet available, it is clear that society publishers use a variety of income streams, including society membership, in-kind contributions, endowment, sponsorship, government grants, subsidies, library support, charging for other publishing services and, in some cases, advertising.

Open Access is therefore compatible with both revenue generation for for-profit publishers and with non-profit publishers whose mission is solely to advance scholarship. Over the last few years, the number of Open Access journals in the HSS has been increasing. Some are new, while others are journals that have converted to Open Access.

The fear that Open Access will lead to the demise of small publishers and the further marginalization of HSS is unfounded. The contrary is actually the case, as demonstrated by the establishment of approximately 3,800 sustainable Open Access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

While the popularity of Open Access journals is growing, it is important to keep in mind that the majority of journals today, including many of the prestigious, long-established ones, are still based on subscription and, given the current incentive structure, most academics still prefer to publish in these journals. So during this transition period, and for authors who cannot find suitable Open Access journals in their field, the best strategy to achieve the academic benefits of Open Access is to take the Green Road.

The Directory of Open Access Repositories lists over 1,300 repositories worldwide, including 44 in Canada, and the number grows at the rate of about one new repository a day.[16] Self-archiving is possible because over 60% of traditional publishers already allow authors to post copies of the peer-reviewed final version of their papers to institutional repositories or on their personal web sites[17]

If the self-archiving right is not explicit, authors can request permission to do so. However, it is better to know your rights before you submit your paper. The Canadian Association of University Teachers recently published an advisory[18] as well as an author addendum[19] that can be used as part of an agreement with publishers to ensure the right to self-archive.

Many Open Access journal publishers go even further, asking authors only for a license to publish the papers on the author's behalf, while the authors retain copyright.[20] This means authors are free to reuse their papers in another contexts, such as teaching, greatly reducing the administrative burden as well as the uncertainty about copyright violation.

What Open Access is not

Self-archiving and publishing in Open Access journals, using both the Green and the Gold Roads, are therefore two complementary ways of providing Open Access to scholarship. And just as one should not conflate the author-pays model with the Gold Road (it is just one way of travelling along the Gold Road), it is also important to keep in mind that institutional repositories are not intended to replace journals.

Institutional repositories are not publishing platforms, but rather dissemination platforms that ensure public access and enhanced discoverability for published or peer-reviewed material. Many repositories also house theses and dissertations, preprints and working papers, datasets, multimedia objects, local teaching resources and other digital scholarly artifacts.

A well-managed institutional repository showcases the institution's collective intellectual output and the faculty research profiles, giving the public and funding agencies a better picture of the institution's accomplishments. It may also serve as an important tool for attracting faculty and recruiting students.

It should be clear then that Open Access is neither about by-passing quality control, nor subverting copyright.

In an Open Access environment, scholars continue to benefit from peer-review, quality measures and institutional legitimacy. They can also take advantage of emerging forms of impact measures designed for the open Web[21], as well as seamless linking of their research to related literature, relevant databases and, above all, their peers and the broader public. They can also make use of the many assistive and extractive tools to perform text searches and other forms of data mining, engage in multilingual translation, and make use of available computational power to perform tasks or analyses not possible before.[22]

Open Access and the scholarly practices that it enables are leading to new ways of exploring old research problems as well as generating new questions.[23] These developments are not simply confined to the sciences, as innovative humanities and social sciences scholarship enabled by Open Access are also emerging.[24] Interestingly, industries, from software to biotechnology, are also realising that openness is accelerating innovations far more rapidly than the closed system of discovery encouraged by old corporate habits of secrecy and competition[25], leading to new business and sustainability models.

By ensuring access of scholarship to our peers and to a broader audience, Open Access is fundamentally transforming the citation and reputation culture of the academy. Recent studies are clearly showing that publications that are openly accessible are far more highly cited than publications that are locked behind gated access.[26] This is very important for researchers as funding agencies and institutions alike are increasingly turning to the Web for information about them and their work in order to make critical professional and funding decisions. For scholars, this is clearly the time to 'be openly accessible or be obscure'.[27]

At the same time, funding agencies are realising that return on investment is not maximised if research they fund is not as widely accessible. Funding research is only a job half-done unless the results are widely diffused and taken up, and restricting access is contradictory to these goals.

In addition, government funding agencies are beginning to acknowledge that the public also has the right to access research funded by tax dollars. Public access to health research, even though specialised, may empower patients and their families, and better access to all basic research may have unseen benefits for citizens, students, teachers, NGOs and policymakers. In other words, there may be unanticipated benefits in social return, in addition to economic returns, when publicly funded research results become publicly available.[28]

The funders respond

Recognising the importance of unrestricted access to research outputs, major funding bodies around the world, such as the US National Institutes of Health, UK Research Councils, The Wellcome Trust, the Australian Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research are among the 61 organisations that have now enacted policies requiring grant recipients to provide public access to their publications.

This has to be done usually within six to 12 months of publication, either through depositing copies of the accepted journal articles in an institutional repository, a prescribed central repository, or through publication in Open Access journals. In most cases, recipients who do not comply with the funding agency's policy will not have grants renewed or receive new funding.[29]

As these public access policies become strictly enforced by funding agencies and followed by grant recipients, we should see a huge increase in Open Access content over the next few years. Many institutional libraries are busy preparing their repositories, and setting up programmes and services to assist their faculty with compliance with the grant requirements.

Non-Open Access publishers are also paying attention. University of California Press, for example, provides one of the most liberal self-archiving agreements, allowing authors to deposit the publisher's pdf version of their paper immediately upon publication. The Press will also deposit an author's articles directly into a repository specified by a funding agency, if the author had received a grant with such a requirement (albeit six months after publication, in order for the press to generate sufficient subscription revenue to sustain their operation).

A growing number of non-profit publishers, concerned with cost recovery rather than profit, are cognisant that self-archiving is not leading to the demise of traditional journals, nor are libraries cancelling journals based on what is openly accessible. Journals continue to provide 'branding' and the valuable services of peer review, copyediting and other forms of quality control.

But other services such as reproduction, distribution, archiving and awareness can be hived off in the online age, greatly reducing the cost of production for journals. Institutional repositories have in effect taken on the distribution and archiving functions and special search engines like OAIster[30] and Google Scholar[31] are indexing materials from institutional repositories, making open access articles far easier to find and retrieve.

New practices enabled by the digital

With increased efficiencies of software tools for managing the entire publishing workflow, the costs of journal production have been decreasing substantially, while the reproduction and distribution costs for online only journals is now close to zero.

To make small publishing operations even more efficient, the Public Knowledge Project[32], a collaboration between Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University, has been providing the free and open source Open Journal System (OJS) for any individual or organisation publishing peer-reviewed journals. Over 3,000 journals, many of them from the developing world,[33]are now using the software.

The Canadian Journal of Sociology (CJS)[34] is a highly instructive example in this regard. Founded in 1975 by a group of sociologists at the University of Alberta, the journal has established a strong reputation and a respectable ranking among publications in its field. In early 2008, the journal transformed itself from a print and subscription journal to an electronic-only journal that is fully Open Access.

The motivation for such a change is to capture the impact advantage Open Access has to offer, the potential to reach new local and international audiences, and to engage in the growing movement of "public sociology" by making the journal content accessible to the public. The conversion to Open Access is possible because by eliminating printing and subscription management and by using the OJS software, the bulk of the costs for producing the journal were also eliminated and the rest of the operation could be funded fully by the subsidies provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.[35]

The editor of CJS, Kevin Haggerty, who was the key driver behind the journal's conversion to Open Access, understood that CJS had to "go open access or risk irrelevance."[36] Haggerty also wanted to dispel the common perception that Open Access journals are lower quality by maintaining the vigorous standard of peer review that has characterised the journal in the past.

In time, Open Access journals with vigorous editorial standards and innovative features will help to foster more sophisticated measures of scholarly value and quality than the blunt and homogenising metrics of the Journal Impact Factor administered and controlled by Thomson's ISI.

Breaking the stranglehold of the Journal Impact Factor by diversifying the modes of evaluating and valuing scholarship that respect disciplinary differences, is indeed one of the key promises of Open Access. It is also in the best interest of scholarship.

But for Open Access to be widely adopted across the academy, institutional inertia, cognitive conservatism and the culture of risk-aversion promoted by the academic reward system needs to be addressed. This may prove to be the biggest challenge to Open Access if university administrations remain largely silent, as they have been, on the question of Open Access.

Actions to be taken

The common misapprehension that engaging in either the Green or Gold Road is detrimental to one's career will linger unless there are clear signals from administrations that Open Access is to be celebrated, not shunned. Debates about the merits and means of archiving Open Access have already made an impact on how publishers behave, and while scholars and librarians initially drove Open Access from the bottom up, recent funding policies on research access have begun to provide a framework from the top.

But university administrations represent the key bridge between policy from the top and initiatives from the bottom. The current policy vacuum in the middle is the primary cause of continued uncertainty and inaction on the part of faculty members.

To encourage action, administrations should be committed to making their university's research output publicly accessible. They could do so quite simply by stipulating that faculty deposit their research output in the institutional repository.

They need to educate faculty and tenure and promotion committee members about the benefits of Open Access. They need to make an institutional commitment to the institutional repository and provide adequate resources so that staff who manage the institutional repository have the clear mission of stewardship and support for scholarship. Administrations should continue to provide adequate funding to libraries, as the funding essentially underwrites the cost of peer review and journal production at the moment.[37]

At the same time, decision-makers need to recognise that there are emerging forms and venues for quality assurance and value proposition for scholarship in the Open Access environment, and they should begin to redirect some of the existing subscription funding towards support for these new initiatives.

Administrations need to consider the new and emerging business models enabled by the networked environment The traditional system of access relies on each individual institution paying for privatised public goods. Open Access could mean that the same institutions could act collectively and pay for the creation and stewardship of a scholarly commons that is accessible to all.[38]

University administrations facing continual budget hardship and funding shortfalls, made worse by the global financial meltdown of 2008, are likely to dismiss Open Access and the suggested actions as a distraction rather than a priority. This would be a big mistake and a missed opportunity. If universities do not act while they still can, they will find themselves once again at the mercy of private entities, this time it may be Google[39], and their roles and relevance in society will be increasingly diluted. As Donald Waters, programme officer for Scholarly Communications at The Andrew W Mellon Foundation, warns us:

"If the academy is unwilling or unable to think carefully now about possible downstream consequences of Open Access publishing and ways to steer clear of undesirable consequences, then the mantra about journal publishing - that the academy gives away its products only to buy them back at exorbitant prices - will surely return to haunt the academy in an even scarier garb than before, and prove to be even more financially debilitating."[40]

Open Access is about more than just the future of journals or books, but the future of scholarly communication. It is also about the future of the institution and practices, as the status quo is being severely challenged. Perhaps this explains why ideas emanating from Open Access are debated so vigorously and the terrain is so contested.

In the process, the academy is being forced to grapple with some fundamental questions about the current state and central mission of the public university, the privilege and obligations of the faculty, the control and stewardship over knowledge, the growth of privatisation in research, university links with business and industry, the role of the government and funding policies, and the rising cost of education and research.

It is arguable that the decisions and actions we take regarding access to our collective intellectual labour and scholarship closely mirrors how we want the university to be and the kind of society in which we wish to live.[41] So what is your choice?

* Open Access: Promises and Challenges of Scholarship in the Digital Age is re-published from Academic Matters.

* The original article in Academic Matters can be found here.

* Leslie Chan is programme supervisor for the Joint Program in New Media Studies and the International Studies program at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Since 2000, he has served as the Associate Director of Bioline International, a non-profit international electronic publishing collaboration with the main objective of improving the visibility and impact of health and other scientific journals from developing countries. As one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Chan has been active in experimentation and implementation of open access publishing projects and with the set up of open access archives using open source software applications.

References

[1] The Merriam-Weber dictionary has recognised 'google' [as a verb as in < to goggle> ] for a number of years now.
[2] Open Access as a term was given a formal meaning by the Budapest Open Access Initiatives (BOAI) in 2002. For detailed timeline to the history of Open Access in the modern era, see Peter Suber
[3] For a detailed treatment of how commercial publishers have transformed research evaluation practices, see Jean-Claude Guedon's essay "In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing".
[4] Glenn S McGuigan and Robert D Russell. "The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing". Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship v.9 no.3 (Winter 2008)
[5] "Why Open Medicine?" Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1 (2007)
[6] "Google and the Future of Books" New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 2 o February 12, 2009
[7] Due to the scope of the paper, I am limiting my discussion primarily to journals, leaving aside the many interesting options for scholarly monographs for another article.
[8] For an in-depth discussion of the roles of institutional repositories in academia, see Leslie Chan, "Supporting and Enhancing Scholarship in the Digital Age: The Role of Open Access Institutional Repositories". Canadian Journal of Communication, 29 (2004) pp. 277-300.
[9] For a listing of institutional and central repositories worldwide, see the number of items in The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR
[10] The terms "Green" and "Gold" Roads to Open Access were coined by Professor Stevan Harnad, a tireless proponents of Open Access, particularly of author self-archiving. See his copious publications and blog on Open Access
[11] As of March 2009, the Directory of Open Access Journals index over 4,000 Open Access titles and they span across the disciplines and research areas.
[12] www.biomedcentral.com
[13] www.plos.org
[14] As of 2 April, the Directory of Open Access Journals index just over 4,000 journal titles from around the world.
[15] www.earlham.edu
[16] It is also encouraging to see the growth of repositories in the developing and transitional economies, with for example Brazil showing 31 and India with 33 repositories set up by universities and research institutions and science academies. While the number itself does not tell the full story, the geographic distribution of institutional repositories demonstrates that Open Access is a worldwide phenomenon. For an interesting mesh-up of institutional repository distribution, see maps.repository66.org
[17] The SHERPA/RoMEO site is a searchable database that allows you to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement. You can type in the journal name or publisher to find out their policies regarding self-archiving.
[18] www.caut.ca
[19] The author addendum was originally created by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and was adapted by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).
[20] See for example the recent policy of Rockefeller University Press regarding author's rights and their journals: newswire.rockefeller.edu
jcb.rupress.org
[21] See new forms of metrics being developed: www.mesur.org Harnad, S (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In: 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, 25-27 June 2007, Madrid, Spain.
[22] For a broad range of examples in emerging forms of scholarship, see Nancy L Maron K Kirby Smith, "Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication: Results of an Investigation Conducted by Ithaka for the Association of Research Libraries" (November 2008).
[23] See for example Andrey Rzhetsky, Michael Seringhaus, and Mark Gerstein, "Seeking a New Biology through Text Mining". Cell 134, July 11, 2008, page 9-13
[24] For a comprehensive overview of changing scholarly practices in the humanities, see Lisa Spiro's blog on "Digital Humanities in 2008, II: Scholarly Communication & Open Access"
[25] See the examples in the book Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, edited by Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Also Open Access can accelerate technology transfer by making it easier for businesses to monitor new discoveries that might be ripe for investment and commercialisation. That is a key reason why the European Commission tech-transfer report of April 2008 recommended Open Access for publicly-funded research.
ec.europa.eu
ec.europa.eu
ec.europa.eu
[26] A bibliography of current research on the citaton impact of Open Access is maintained by Steve Hitchcock. It is evident from the studies that the Open Access advantage is not confined to the sciences, but is evident in the humanities and social sciences as well.
[27] This is the title of the blog by Jim Till, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Till is a pioneer in stem cell research and he keeps the blog to inform researchers about ongoing Open Access developments.
[28] See the newly released study (January 2009) by John Houghton and eight co-authors on the "Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits". Funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee.
[29] The Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) provides a listing of existing funders as well as institutional mandates on self-archiving.
[30] This special search service now indexes 19 million record from over 1000 institutions from around the world.
[31] Google Scholar also shows the citation count as well as links to articles that cite the paper being searched. This allows you to follow the citation trail and see who is citing your work in an expanded context.
[32] Spearheaded by John Willinsky, "The Public Knowledge Project is a research and development initiative directed toward improving the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online publishing and knowledge-sharing environments."
[33] See the number and distribution of journals using OJS.
[34] ejournals.library.ualberta.ca
[35] For the 2008-2011 "Aids to Scholarly Journals" programme, SSHRC had changed one of the key eligibility criteria from one based strictly on the minimum number of journal subscribers to one based on usage or 'regular readers' (as shown through subscriber list or web usage report). This means the funding model is agonistic to the business models of the journals, allowing the adjudicators to concentrate on the quality of the editorial board, the peer review process, and the readership of the journals as the basis of evaluation.
[36] informationr.net
[37] I have borrowed heavily from Peter Suber's "Three Principles for University Open Access Policies". Interested readers should consult the full details of the principles and their corollaries at:
www.earlham.edu
[38] Roger Clarke, Business Models to Support Content Commons. SCRIPTed, Vol 4(1), 2007, page 59-71. Gale Moore and Leslie Chan, "Innovating in the Creative and Knowledge Industries: Not an Open or Closed Case". The International Forum on the Creative Economy by The Conference Board of Canada, 2008
[39] For a thought-provoking discussion of the monopolistic power of Google and its Google Book Search project, see Robert Darton's article on "Google and the Future of Books", New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 2 o February 12, 2009
[40] Open Access Publishing and the Emerging Infrastructure for 21st-Century Scholarship. Donald Waters. Ann Arbor, MI: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan, University Library. vol. 11, no. 1, Winter 2008
[41] For an extended discussion about the public mission of the university and Open Access, see John Willinsky's The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press 2005. For a detailed treatment of the political economy of scholarly production and open access, see Gary Hall's new book Digitize this book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. University of Minnesota Press, 2008